THE SUMMONING

In Shafer’s memoir, the author wanders in the “secret garden” of her memories.

The Summoning: The Keys to Backward, Tara Shafer, Gatekeeper Press 2025

In this brief nonfiction debut, Shafer begins with memories and impressions drawn from her childhood (in one of many good artistic choices made by the author, the photographs reproduced in these sections are in black-and-white—the text’s later sections include full-color images) and steadily expands the scope of these vignettes to encompass the wider world and a broader array of existential questions about time, place, and memory. The memory-focused portions of these early parts of the book are suffused with nostalgia but given an edge—there is a hard, clear-eyed acknowledgement of the past’s unreachability. “It is not easyto correct a mistake—even if one could embody time and become a contortionist, gruesome and fascinating,” Shafer writes, positing that “the very most authentic longing shouldreorder time.” The author steadily weaves memory and impression together in these reflections, which often incorporate flights of poetic language. “I thought that tears were courage,” she writes in this vein, “that grief must be swaddled and rocked like an infant until it spends itself and gives weight to multi-dimensional dreamscapes with the tidal rhythms of its soft petal breath.” Shafer writes with a dreamy kind of eloquence that can be very enjoyable to take in (“Dancers turn into snowflakes and shimmer down a dark path,” reads one passage of evocative imagery). But readers must pay a substantial toll in the form of enduring a good deal of woo-woo pseudo-profundities typical of inspirational memoirs: “This story is nonlinear. All stories are,” readers are told, even though this is demonstrably untrue; “Know what you don’t know,” the author urges, even though this is, by definition, impossible. Still, patient readers will find plenty of beauty in these pages.

A gauzy but very readable imagistic memoir.